Notes from 9/12–16/12
Career
How to Make Remote a Success
- Start from the boss
- Have a shared language
- Use Requests for Comments so you can work async. Every decision made within project needs to be documented and approved so people can understand why it was made.
- turn everything into a blog post (shared knowledge base)
- organise weekly demos
- send out weekly notes, this serves as a foundation
- make everyone feel connected
- have daily checks
They also recommend some tools, but these are just general notetaking, conferencing
A guide to distributed teams
Provides a handy overview of the key issues that affect distributed teams. All teams become distributed as they grow.
Communcation — give everyone the context they need to perform. Async allows people to engage when it best suits them.
Collaboration — develop promotion processes that explicitly reward collaborative behaviours
Organisation — resist temptation to feature creep, organise groups by function
Operations — hiring processes should reflect the nature of remote work
Culture — reinforce your culture constantly
A Distributed Meeting Primer
First: let’s call these humans teams distributed teams. Distributed is a boring word, but it is in that boringness that we solve one issue. Remote implies far from the center, whereas distributed means elsewhere.
Second: Let’s agree that no matter what we call the situation that the humans who are elsewhere are at a professional disadvantage.1 There is a communication, culture, and context tax applied to the folks who are distributed.2 Your job as a leader to actively invest in reducing that tax.
So I’ve had to learn this simply be reading cues!
The Evolution of Management
You don’t solve the problem yourself now; you create an environment where other people can solve the problem. This is how you add value.
• Let go of the immediate/quick sense of gratification that comes from doing/building/creating.
• Accolades and recognition become less frequent as you move up.
• You derive your sense of accomplishment from mentoring, growing, and furthering the work of your team and those around you.
• Add value by removing roadblocks, streamlining processes, and helping others be productive.
• Think one to two years out for your project and roadmap.
- Help people connect their work to the parent organization or company, and help them see their individual impact and value.
L2
knowing what calls really matter
This is why it becomes critically important to get the right people into a few key roles. In engineering teams, culture can be established at the manager/product level, but it can also come in the functional unit. As such, having a few really good senior people (technologists, project managers, product managers, UX leads, etc.) can help you maintain quality, excellence, and progress.
• Continue learning to let go of control and allow people to make mistakes. Balance the importance of getting your way with the risk of undermining your people. Focus on the calls that really matter.
• People management is still about mentoring, but there is a new level of transparency with your direct reports about the rewards of their work.
• Your job is to think into the future. How do all of your teams fit together? How do changes in priorities affect the way people and resources are distributed? It is always better to be the person who can do more with less.
• Succession planning comes into play. Make sure you have a solid plan to grow your leadership bench and maintain successors (or a plan) for all critical roles.
- You are responsible for progress and execution. It’s your job to make systems that work, track the right metrics, and share those results with your leadership.
L3
Your job is no longer the “what.” your job is now the “how.”
Feeling a connection with you is a way for the people on your team to feel connected with the company they work for. No, you won’t be friends or even on a first-name basis with everyone under you, but making an effort to be accessible will help people want to follow your lead over time. Based on my experience, the more people spend time with you and get to know you, the more effective you can be as a leader.
The name of the game now is trust. Your people need to trust you, and you need to trust your people.
Trust, but verify
But there is a caveat to that trust: You must also audit. Yes, you trust your managers, but you also do the work to check in.
When people do leave, always take the time to do exit interviews. Uncovering the flaws in your people-management system is just as important as finding the flaws in your programs and projects. There is always a push and a pull when someone leaves, so try to uncover both and identify a way to improve.
Data
KNIME Analytics Platform is the “killer app” for machine learning and statistics
Incredible! Worth trying out
Our Old Ways of Teaching Coding at School Are At An End … Meet The New Way Forward!
Jupyter notebooks as a teaching tool — I think google colab is the way forward
A Machine Learning framework for Algorithmic trading on Energy markets
Sort of step by step approach to algorithmic trading, where to get info, backtesting etc
Design
Cheat sheets: UI terms
Learning a new language, also generally useful if you need to do front-end
Learn How to Quickly Create UIs in Python
Looks way better than running off anaconda shell!
Security
Privacy Analysis of Tiktok’s App and Website
Shitstorm. Everything is being tracked and stored.
Tools
Guide to note taking
Perhaps it’s time to develop one method for myself?
